


kisses so bitter

by deniigiq



Series: Inimitable Verse [20]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Eating Disorders, Established Relationship, Gen, M/M, Major Illness, Recovery, Service Dogs, as in foggy struggles to put on weight after having had cancer, it's kind of a tough road, look out guys the old men are being loving towards each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:27:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24620827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Let me make you dinner,” he crooned into Foggy’s neck.Foggy reached up and dragged a hand through Matt's hair.“I’m not hungry,” he said.“Let me do it anyways,” Matt told him.The fingers clenched tight in his hair.“Don’t cry,” Matt murmured. “Everything’s alright. Don’t cry.”(Some days are harder than others for the old guys, but they work their way through it.)
Relationships: Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Series: Inimitable Verse [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1117746
Comments: 29
Kudos: 481





	kisses so bitter

**Author's Note:**

> as a birthday gift to myself, I bring y'all heartfelt MattFoggy.

Foggy was losing weight again. He wasn’t finishing plates, wasn’t opening snack bags, wasn’t showing much interest when they went out for meals.

This was how the cancer started. A lack of appetite. Searing headaches. Dizziness.

This was how the cancer ended, with Foggy wasting away slowly in a hospital bed. His fingers thinner and thinner each time Matt picked up his hand and cupped it between his own.

And now it came back.

Like an ominous warm breeze before the storm.

The doc said that they needed to keep an eye on the nausea. She was worried about Foggy’s apparently dark circles and his lethargy. Matt had noticed the latter, but his fingers, no matter how hard he tried, couldn’t find color in the things that he touched.

Foggy could hide things like the circles from him, even if he couldn’t hide the erratic sleeping and lack of appetite.

Matt fit their fingers together as Foggy leaned against his shoulder.

His heart beat fast against the skin of Matt’s wrist.

He was scared. Scared of the tumor coming back. Scared of having to do everything all over again. Scared of the wasting and rotting and the pain—god, the pain. He pressed the socket of his eye against Matt’s shoulder and it was all Matt could do not to let the tear trying to escape slip out of his own eye.

“Just a hearing test, Fogs,” he forced himself to say instead. “That’s all she wants you to do.”

Foggy pressed his forehead harder against Matt’s arm.

“I don’t want to,” he whispered.

God. Jesus.

Matt swallowed hard.

“I won’t make you,” he said. “But I’ll be right there.”

He brought their intertwined hands up to press a kiss against Foggy’s too-prominent knuckles.

“I’m right here,” he said.

The drugs and the therapy gave Foggy tinnitus in the hospital. It had been profoundly upsetting for him to hear things that no one else did and Matt had struggled—really struggled to be empathetic. It was hard to be sorry for people when his own life was full of things that no one else could hear. It was hard to shove past that wall and try to imagine a world in which the sounds that he heard didn’t actually exist outside of his head. The concept itself was so foreign that it had taken him weeks to process it.

Fogs kept the tinnitus for a few months after he got out of the hospital. He didn’t habituate to it well. He woke up and had anxiety attacks over it when Matt wasn’t next to him, to the point that Daredevil developed a self-enforced curfew of 4:00am to ensure that he’d be there around the time that Foggy’s body started to struggle its way back to consciousness against his will.

The audiologist told them brightly that Foggy had passed his test with flying colors.

“Typical Nelson,” Matt murmured to him as they traversed the halls to the next department, where a blood sample for labs would be drawn.

Foggy didn’t say anything, but his heartbeat settled a little bit, which Matt took as a win and possibly a little smile directed his way.

The gal stabbing Foggy asked him how long he and Matt had been married and aw’ed when Foggy explained that it was coming on ten years. He told her a reductionist version of Matt losing the ring at their wedding and she laughed and just like that, the whole affair was over.

They left the hospital and got a bus back towards home with a piece of gauze now trapped between their arms.

Foggy was tired and wanted to sleep. Matt felt guilty for chiding him not to sleep quite yet—to save it for night hours.

“Let me make you dinner,” he crooned into Foggy’s neck.

Foggy reached up and dragged a hand through his hair.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“Let me do it anyways,” Matt told him.

The fingers clenched tight in his hair.

“Don’t cry,” Matt murmured. “Everything’s alright. Don’t cry.”

He didn’t mean it. Foggy could cry on him for as long and much as he wanted. That’s what Matt’s shoulders were for. That was who they were for.

But still.

He pulled back enough to wipe tears away from those dark circles he couldn’t see.

“I’ve got you, my dear,” he said. “You know I’ve got you.”

“I’m such a mess,” Foggy croaked.

“My mess,” Matt hummed.

Foggy lifted his arms to wrap them more solidly around Matt’s neck and pressed in close again. His face was warm and his breath was wet and Matt would give him anything that he had to give.

“’M sorry, Matty.”

Psh.

“Hey, now. No need for sorrys.”

Foggy’s break still caught in hitches, but they were slowing down and his lips were cooling.

“Have a lounge,” Matt hummed into his too-thin neck. “Let me make you dinner. Something easy, hm? I can do you some potato pancakes or a solid veg stew. Take your pick.”

The puff of air that blustered against his shoulder told him that they would be alright.

“God, no more soup,” Foggy sniffled.

“Amen to that,” Matt said, “Tatties it is; you’re makin’ my daddy proud, Mr. Nelson.”

Sam tended to cook for himself since he found most of Matt and Foggy’s choices of cuisine to be bland and occasionally baffling. He didn’t overly understand why they were so into pickled veg and cured meat, but he tried, bless him.

He didn’t like giardiniera. He’d tried so many times.

He came upstairs with what sounded like paper bags in his arms and asked Matt quietly how things had gone with the doc.

“Fine,” Matt told him. “But the anxiety is up today, so walk gently.”

“I got weird sodas,” Sam said. “Is that okay?”

That was perfect.

“You want some pancakes?” Matt asked him.

Sam said yes and it was only when he was halfway downstairs that Matt remembered that he hadn't said that they were potato pancakes.

Welp.

The kid would find out soon enough.

“Fogs.”

“Mm?”

“One more?”

Foggy sighed. Matt tried to make himself as handsome as possible.

“Alright.”

Score.

“Did Sam like them?”

Matt handed Foggy his plate back and settled in next to him on the couch with his own again.

“I think he’s trying to figure out how to break it to me that they aren’t pancakes,” he said.

Foggy snickered and it was the best sound of the day.

The dogs were good for Foggy no matter how much he cursed them and complained about them--Hazel, especially. There was nothing Foggy needed more than something to bitch about to bring his spirits up and Hazel was delighted to be that gal every time.

Matt adored her more than words could convey for the light sprinkling of exasperation that she brought his husband on the daily.

“Really?” he heard Fogs groan the next morning when he tried to sneak out of bed to put on coffee before Matt.

Hazel sneezed.

“Bless you,” Foggy said as Matt stretched and oh-so-conveniently tossed an arm out to wrap around his waist.

“Come back to bed,” Matt hummed.

“I’m already up,” Foggy said.

Matt rolled over so that he could wriggle his head onto Foggy’s thigh and wrap both arms securely around his middle.

It didn’t feel right. It felt about forty pounds wrong. But it smelt right, the skin was as soft as it was meant to be, and most importantly, it was starting to get a little cool in the air of the room.

“You’re cold, come back,” Matt said.

Foggy couldn’t argue with that. The evidence was right there in Matt’s very own hands, so he let himself be pulled back down and tucked in under the duvet.

Hazel went back to lay down by her sister.

Fogs didn’t need to know that Matt had trained her specifically to block him from leaving the room first in the morning. Sam didn’t need to know that Matt had taught her to go make sure he was still breathing, either.

It was better for everyone to just let them think that she was a menace who needed to be all up in everyone’s business from the crack of dawn until the harness went on.

Matt got up to go make coffee after Foggy had dozed off again tucked up against his chest. He heard Sam perform his ritual bed-fall downstairs while he was measuring out the grounds.

Did he get it?

No.

But to each their own method of waking up, he figured.

Foggy took his coffee with two seconds of milk and a teaspoon of sugar. The clinking of the spoon against the coffee mill brought Hazel’s nails click-clacking across the tile.

Matt gave her a pat and a treat for a morning ritual well done. Tuesday would get hers when she rustled Fogs up for his coffee. But first there were footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Morning, Boss.”

“Apprentice. You want caffeine?”

“No thanks. Got sludge going downstairs,” Sam said through a yawn.

He wasn’t upstairs for Matt. He was there for Tuesday--and Hazel tangentially. He’d have to wait, then, but he didn’t seem to have a problem with that. It was a Saturday. They didn’t have anywhere to go.

“Sensei,” he said sleepily. “I liked the things last night. Do they have a name?”

Aw.

Dad, look at this. You are pleasing the youth from beyond the grave.

“Potato pancakes,” Matt said. “Or, as Dad used to say ‘tatties.’”

Sam’s silence spoke volumes.

“He didn’t discern between types,” Matt explained to him. “If it had potatoes in it, they were ‘tatties.’”

“Hashbrowns?”

“Tatties,” Matt said sagely.

“Mashed?”

“Tatties.”

“Fried?”

“Tatties.”

“Is that an Irish thing? Or just a him thing?”

“Never asked.”

“I like him. Your dad.”

Matt did, too.

“Hey, kid. I need your blue vision,” he said.

Sam’s heat perked up.

“What for?” he asked.

“Survey Husband’s face for bags. Please report back on size and color. This is a long-term request to be implemented at your discretion.”

“On it, Bossman.”

Matt took down a mug at the sound of Foggy shoving sheets back in the other room.

Breakfast was coffee and a slice of toast that was allowed to multiple by itself and a half.

Lunch was leftover pancakes, punctuated by Sam coming up smelling of something hot and iron-y for a bandage for a finger that he described as having gotten ‘a little toasty.’

Dinner was a few packages of udon, stir-fried in soy and sugar with egg and veggies.

“I forget sometimes that you’re not the worst cook,” Foggy told him when he came back to set a jar of chili and garlic paste on the coffee table.

“I’ll take a class for you,” Matt offered him.

He didn’t expect it when Foggy hummed and said, “Why don’t we take it together? It’s been a minute since we did a class.”

It had been ages since they’d done anything like that. The firm took so much of their time and then Matt had his rage to pummel into shape at night and Sammy to train up before that. Foggy was usually wiped after the day’s work at the office. And in all the chaos of moving from office to home and city to home and city to home to office to home to city, they often went days without talking about shit that wasn’t work.

He was right.

It _had_ been a while since they’d set time aside just for the two of them.

“I’m going to beat you in cooking class,” Matt declared.

“As if you could,” Foggy said.

“I could,” Matt said, sitting up properly.

Foggy snickered.

“I _could_.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Foggy said kindly. “What do you think? Cakes? Chocolates? French bullshit?”

Mmmmm.

“Mr. Nelson,” Matt said. “I do believe that it is time.”

“Time?”

“For research.”

Foggy laughed.

“It’s endless,” he said.

“Don’t worry, I got this. I’m googling ‘competitive porridge making’ as we speak.”

“Give me that thing, you monster.”

Now there was a tone that Matt liked to hear.

Back on track. For now.


End file.
